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“The society which has abolished every kind of adventure makes its own abolition the only possible adventure.” Paris, May 1968

Friday, 29 March 2013

LeftUnity - Good luck but..........

I wish that I could feel more positive about LeftUnity. There are clearly lots of good people getting involved and if what I hear is to be believed, many of them are not the usual political hobbyists but just folk who are fed up to the back teeth with the constant stream of spending cuts. So I have no quibble with those who have climbed aboard the LeftUnity train so far. I am all in favour of working together with people of differing political persuasions; this is after all what we do every day at work or in our communities. This might involve us playing a part in the smooth(ish) operation of a hospital ward, being involved in a mass strike or simply recognising that them next door are cracking neighbours even if they do vote Tory. So I have no problem with people from separate strands of left politics joining together to work on a particular project. No, my concern iswhat exactly is that project? Because there are few more demoralising scenarios than the grand founding meeting, the usual suggestions about what the group might do followed by the sad decline into a series of ever more sparsely attended meetings. Am I the only one who thinks that a better option is to have a project in mind and then start looking around for a group of comrades to help you pull it off? Doing things the other way round is a recipe for disillusionment.

2 comments:

Gitane
said...

http://livesrunning.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/the-peoples-assmebly-an-auto-critique/Having read Dave Renton's piece on the People's Assembly and the problems of Trot/ Leninist cadre inspired politics in the UK left, it is somewhat inspiring to see a non cadre initiative like Left Unity get off the ground and trump the opportunists of the SWP et al.However LeftUnity seems to be lottery inspired where you have to be "in it to win it", yet unlike the lottery I don't see where the poor and working class fit into to all this Unity supposedly activated on their behalf.No doubt there are a lot of pissed off people out there with access to computers, but that's a million megabites away from the desired militant, politicised and collectivised mob.

I was enthusiastic at first but doubts are coming in. I don't like the patronising attitude to working class people. Says Jenny Ross: 'These guys are just totally brainwashed. The passed down, Daily Mail, cribbed-off-the-front-of-The-Sun crap that these people will parrot is amazing. They have never questioned this stuff at all'. Well thank you middle class intellectuals you can put us all right. I also have worries about putting our differences aside to fight a common enemy. There are reasons for our differences and for me the differences are such that the traditional left are as bad, if not worse, than the Tories. And is it going to be a Red-Green alliance, combining eco fascism with the statist objectives of the Labour left? That worries me because the green ideology being inserted into the Left Unity narrative is based on environmentalist beliefs where the science is driven by politics, and we saw where that went in Stalin's Russia - Lysenko anyone? Before committing to this outfit we need serious discussion among ourselves anarchists and class based working class activists. We have not had it and too many anarchists are charging in.